The Trump administration’s plan to freeze fuel-economy standards is “the most spectacular regulatory flip-flop in history,” said a retired EPA engineer who helped to develop new the standards under the Obama administration.

“These standards weren’t going to be the ultimate solution for solving the climate problem, but they were a very, very important first step,” said Jeff Alson, who retired this past April after a 40-year career at the EPA. “That’s why this delay is so risky to us.”

The Obama-era fuel-economy rules for cars and trucks—which former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt announced the Trump administration would “revise” this past April—would have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 540 million metric tons and oil consumption by 1.2 billion barrels.

The previous rules were developed over a period of seven years by the EPA and the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Passed in 2010 and 2012, the standards required automakers to continuously increase their vehicles’ fuel efficiency and decrease their emissions through the year 2025. Alson said the effort—which involved “hundreds of meetings”—resulted in a plan to effectively double fuel efficiency over that time period while allowing automakers to incrementally improve their technology.

Since 2012 the rules have saved drivers “tens of billions of dollars on fuel and cut hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions,” according to a recent Union of Concerned Scientists blog post by retired General Motors engineer Greg Kempf.

The Trump plan, however, would put that savings on hold and flatline further fuel-economy improvements for six years. If passed, it would result in a 500,000 barrel-a-day increase of oil consumption in the United States, according to S&P Global Markets. The rules, according to the August 24 announcement in the Federal Register, are actually designed to increase fossil-fuel consumption, saying the country has increased oil production enough to reduce “the urgency of the U.S. to conserve energy.”

By contrast, the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that the world must, among other actions, rapidly switch to electric vehicles powered by renewable energy if it hopes to avoid a climate-change catastrophe.

A Change in Plans

Although the automotive industry publicly supported the old standards, experts say they also advocated for slowing them down, as evidenced by a letter a trade group called the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers sent to President Trump shortly after his inauguration.

“The industry is more concerned with their quarterly profits than long-term greenhouse gas emissions,” said John M. DeCicco, research professor at the University of Michigan Energy Institute. “The Obama-era standards would have been a move in the right direction for the climate, but now we’re regressing.”

The Trump administration’s freeze may appeal to corporate supporters, but they are not popular with the public. Alson testified at a public meeting about the plan last month and said “five or…

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